This Blog is a part of my media social experiment. Comments, suggestions and questions are welcome (vv.free.physics@gmail.com). For the specific lists of posts use links on the right. For consulting services of Education Advancement Professionals visit www.GoMars.xyz. Thank you for visiting, Dr. Valentin Voroshilov.

For decades, education
had, has and will have the same set of functions: content preparation, management
and delivery; class observations and management (student-content interactions,
student-student interactions, student-teacher interactions), assessing student’s
progress, assessing teacher’s efficacy; and then there are levels of a single
institution, of a district, of a state, and then there are administrators,
parents, politicians, hence there are great many processes that may be augmented
by the use of a device or devices.

An EdTech entrepreneur
approaches someone from the target audience and explains how his/her invention
will change the life of students/teachers/parents/administrators."Hi, we have a solution! Do you happen to have a problem our solution solves? No? Thank you for your time."

Then eventually the sale is
made.

Then things don’t change much.

Then a startup
goes bankrupt.

Then another
startup is born and the circle of life and death repeats itself.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

This post was written in 2016 and
originally posted
on another web-site (there are more pages there from that time). However, the current discussion of the health of Donald Trump makes this post relevant again.

Donald Trump is a fighter, there is no
doubt about that. I bet, when he started his campaign, even he did not expect
the victory (what a shock he must have had on November 8th!). After
being featured in nine movies, running a popular TV show, a run for the
Presidency of the United State seemed like a natural and final step in his
career as an entertainer. That would bring to his huge ego a new wave of
attraction he would get from people, which would peak all the attraction he had
had during his whole life.

If Trump starts a
journey, he goes all the way. His goal is to win. There are no rules.

Fight. Hit.
Adrenalin.

It is not Trump’s
fault that he became the President.

It is not even the
fault of people who voted for him.

The blame must go to
the establishment of the Democratic party.

I have a large post
on this matter and the rest of this piece is not about it.

I want to address an
issue which none of the news outlets addresses.

Donald Trump will NOT
be our President.

Well, formally he
will.

But in actuality he
will NOT.

Have you seen
pictures of Obama eight years ago and now?

Do you see what to be
the President does to a person?

The President has to
do a hard actual work, which requires 24/7 a huge amount of physical and
intellectual power.

Anyone who thinks
that Donald Trump is capable of reading (forget about writing) long and
complicated documents is just delusional.

I dare everyone who
voted for Trump to take a piece of paper and write: “I
voted for Trump because …” and add at least 5 specific reasons. On the back
side of this page write “In four years my life will be better …” and write at
least five specific improvements you expect to happen in your life. Save this
paper and take it out in four years.

The best-case
scenario, he will become America’s “Quinn Elizabeth”. Which, as we all know,
was the actual plan of his team. When Trump became the nominee, the team was
looking for people who would run internal and external political affairs,
leaving Trump “making America Great Again”.

The worst-case
scenario, Trump will become America’s Leonid Brezhnev, or Boris Yeltsin. Both
of them during last years of their reign did not do any actual governing. Trump
is already out of the governing – he cannot govern any more even his own
Twitter account.

Why do you think the
FBI became a “Trumpland”? BFI detail has been watching 24/7 both – Hillary and
Trump. They saw who was easy to be manipulated and who not. Hence, FBI was not
rooting for “an iron lady”.

When a silent voter
casted his (mostly) or her vote for Donald Trump, it was an act of “screaming”:
“I exist, you mother f*&%^#@rs! I hate you and I want you to go!”. They saw
Trump as a “King Kong” who will destroy “those f#$%&*ing corrupt establishment
pigs”.

Firstly, I doubt that
the same people would vote for Trump if they saw him as a puppet incapable of
actual governing. This image could have brought a real opportunity for
Democrats to beat Trump – if they were smart enough to see it.

Secondly, there is
only one way to fight corruption – it is making a society as open and
transparent as possible. This is just a historical fact: the more decisions are
getting brokered within a narrow circle behind closed doors, the higher and
wider the level of corruption. When a government starts cracking down on media
outlets criticizing it – this is it; it is corrupt; and the more cracking down
is happening, the more corrupt the government is. People who for four years
have been sitting on a couch waiting for crumbs of prosperity would trickle
down to them, and when it did not happen channeled their anger and frustration
by electing a “Big Gorilla”, have to look in a mirror and ask: “Hey, why didn’t
you vote in any local elections, or primaries, or didn’t participate in town
halls? What have you done on an everyday basis to make America greater than it
is now?”

Anyway, let’s go back
to the original question: who will be the actual President of the
United States?

Who, despite the fact
that NO American voted for him (I am absolutely positive – it will be HIM),
will de facto govern the country?

Who will be America’s
“Grigori Rasputin”, or possible “Vladimir Putin”?

This is what I
would like to hear from the people on a TV screen.

Because, it is very
probable, that that person will indeed become America’s “Vladimir
Putin”.

I will not be
surprised at all if in a year or two Donald Trump gets ill (President’s work is
hard, too hard!). For a while Mike Pence will take over the White House. But
then the real puppet master will emerge.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Instead of making
the original post longer and longer by adding more and more examples of “management”
I decided to start a new one.

The pictures above are taken
in some garage.

Every visitor of the
garage has to take a ticket (picture on the left), and before leaving the
garage has to validate the ticket in a machine (picture on the right).

Some people do not
know about validating and proceeded directly to the bar gate without validating
a ticket.

If that happens,
the bar gate does not move, and a driver has to call the campus police. Then a
security guard has to go to the car, talk to the driver, explain that the
ticket needs to be validated, so, the driver needs to backup, find a spot to
park a car, go to the machine, validate the ticket hoping the total time will
not change (or a driver would have to pay extra), go back to a car and drive to
the bar gate again.

Evidently, that
has been happening enough time to force management place a sign – as shown in
the next picture.

Seems reasonable,
doesn’t it?

Well, the fact of
the matter is that this sign is placed at the bar gate that needs to be opened to leave the garage!

So, a driver who did
not validate a ticket but drove to the gate, realized that the ticket
did no open the gate, had read the sign, backup the car, etc., etc.

This sign solved a
problem – one specific problem.

Now a guard does
not have to walk to a car to explain what to do.

The problem this sign has solved was the annoyance of the campus police.

However, naturally,
this sign does not help anyone who is entering the garage and not familiar with
the whole procedure.

Could THAT problem
be addressed – the problem of helping
people to avoid all the troubles in the FIRST place?

I’ll keep you in suspense.

No, I won’t.

Of course, the
actual solution would be placing a
warning sign at the entrance!

And such examples
exist, for example - Logan Airport garage.

The difference
between where to place a sign demonstrates the difference between management and
“management”.

Every organization (a.k.a. a system) has its mission, goals, functions. A manager is like a conductor, responsible for finding right people and orchestrating the most efficient work on their part. If something goes "south", ultimately, that's a manager's fault. "Fish rots from the head down" - people say it for a reason (and Russians add "... but gets eaten from its tail"). A manager thinks
about making life of clients/users better/easier.

A “manager” thinks
about … well, this sentence may have many different endings.

It’s easier to say
what a “manager” does not think about – he or she does not think about the
mission of his/her organization, does not think about improving the efficiency
of the functioning of the organization.Or maybe this "manager" does care about his/her organization, maybe he/she is a nice person, but just incompetent. It does not matter. The results mater, not the reasons.

That is why he/she
cannot really be called a “manager”, but rather a clerk, someone who is busy to
do all paperwork to make it look good, but does not really think about anything
beyond that.

The signs of “management”
of such “managers” are everywhere – in business, in public institutions, in
governing, in politics.

BTW: in the opening picture "self confidence" is not a skill. There are many "management trainers" who don't really know what management is, they are often no different from a motivational speaker - "you have to believe in yourself, be on time, talk to people!" A good manager needs people skills, but having people skills does not make one a good manager. There are many logical conundrums like this one. Another one - "A good politician needs to have charisma, but having charisma does not make one a good politician".

This is what management is:

The mission (the reason
for existence) of management is establishing
healthy development
of the governed system, preventing degradation of the system, and
facilitating its progressive evolution.

The goal of management
is optimizing exchanges
between the governed system and the environment.

The function of
management is making decisions.

In late 1980-early 1990s Russian economist, politician and administrator Gavriil Popov has developed "Administrative Theory". In part, he stated that a bureaucracy - any bureaucracy (governmental, political, administrative, scientific, financial, ...) - if not checked regularly via open-channel feedback always inevitably becomes a self-serving machine. The main goal of bureaucracy, i.e. of each and every bureaucrat, becomes (a) a the minimum - self preservation; (b) at the maximum - self-promotion. Bureaucracy assess every action, every step, every plan from those two points of view: does it represent a threat to personal surviving? does it help to get some personal gains? Personal goals of a bureaucrat override goals of the organization/system. Statements like "I am the state!" or "Let be a flood after us" capture the essence of such bureaucratic psychology.A book "Backstabbing for Beginners" offers a great description of how a bureaucratic machine works (in this case the UN), how it eventually leads to corruption (and "losing" billions of dollars).A manager is a bureaucrat. He or she also is at risk to place his/her own personal goals above the goals of the system he/she manages. That is why every effective managing always includes checks and balances, and must be as open as possible. A closed system eventually comes to a stagnation, degradation, and a decay. It it gets absorbed by another system. Or it gets blown up from an inside.

Example # next

When a car with no permit enters this garage, the attendant spend at least five minutes to talk to the driver, find out what's what, make the driver leave or issue a temporary permit. During peak ours a line of several cars may grow behind. What needs to be done is very simple, an attendant need to tell the driver to move the car in a spot on the right.

And then do his thing.But it is not the attendant's responsibility to come up with this step. The garage manager has to do that.And if he/she doesn't that means that he/she is not a manager, but just a "manager".For consulting services of Education Advancement Professionals please visit www.GoMars.XYZ